


So Come the Storms

by LadySwillmart



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Gen, The kind of story that makes Nothing Happen, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-25
Updated: 2020-04-25
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:34:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23839954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadySwillmart/pseuds/LadySwillmart
Summary: Nero Scaeva gets down with the Fairport Convention with this meandering vignette, set shortly after Patch 4.4 (originally written in October 2018). With Alpha in tow, he takes a stroll down the rugged western shores of La Noscea, picking up garbage while contemplating mudlarking permits and home ownership. Light housekeeping, that sort of thing. It's free real estate, and that's really all there is to it.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 13





	So Come the Storms

Featured song is _Who Knows Where the Time Goes_ , written by the incomparable Sandy Denny and performed by The Fairport Convention on their 1969 album Unhalfbricking.

Before you read this, I have to give my most sincere thanks to my friend Issinder, who did a lovely reading of this story! Please [check it out right here](https://soundcloud.com/issinder/so-come-the-storms-by-swilly) and listen as you read along!

* * *

He laid silent, still, face-down in the narrows between two glistening rocks. A fallen soldier, or at least parts of him as I discovered when I wrested him from his resting place, gingerly, with my forefinger and thumb. Just a thumb’s worth of metal. Tin, I should think, and perhaps originally cast to such detail that even the most unimaginative child could wage wonders of wars. But as they like to say in these parts: “’til the sea swallows all”. I can only assume that whatever the sea cannot digest ends its voyage here, washing up along the low, marshy and very stagnant shallows of northwestern Vylbrand. 

With my keen eye I detected him, an eroded memory of a man save for a speck of red crust on his coat. A sole survivor of gods know what. His left leg was but a nub. Sword arm absent. I know not how they handle such cases in these lands, but in Garlemald, it would be deemed well past time to put this old goat _out to pasture_. Reverently, I poke a few more clods of mud off his delicate figure before tossing him into the sack.

It can be a solemn activity, mudlarking. Though I hesitate to say solitary as I am not alone this time. Alpha bandies about my feet, fascinated by my cheesecloth treasure sack and the unpredictable jingling it makes as it bounces against my hip. For its solemnity, mudlarking is also a sport of many noises. The splorching of my wooden shoes as they struggle against the natural suction of wet sand. The susurrant babel of the water, swelling and receding, in and out, in and out, _ad infinitum_. Birds of all sorts, pipers and gulls and dodos mostly, petitioning for a mate or a meal. Alpha included, which may explain why he is so very interested in my bag, even though he knows full well that I gave him the responsibility of carrying our sandwiches.

“Kweh!”

“Not yet, Alpha,” I remind him. “A little further down the shore, then we’ll sit for lunch.”

“Kwe-kweh!” He nudges the sack, a bit too merrily for such a winter’s day, while the awareness that it is actually autumn somehow makes our sunless setting all the more somber. The skies, normally clear (if moody), resemble the cold chowder we had for dinner the night before. Today, the western end of La Noscea’s horizon is an unfinished painting, one where the painter could not be arsed to render but a few objects in the foreground before allowing Baderon to hang the wretched thing in the Drowning Wench’s cheapest room.

But enough about my current lodgings; we are in good spirits nevertheless.

“Oi! What’s that over there? Alpha?” I point down the rocks a bit, hoping Alpha will notice something interesting enough for him to disengage his swirling stranglehold around my legs. It works, but only briefly; we begin to walk in tandem, crunching against mostly rocks and shells and the fractured debris of millions upon millions of ruined clay pipes. Maybe the occasional bit of commemorative crockery for an event long forgotten. Twisted scraps of metal. Spent munitions from old pirate wars. Knife handles and doubloons and tortoiseshell buttons, if it is a lucky day. Alpha bounds over an impressive sculpture of driftwood and squeaks at a shiny spot nestled in the silt.

“Kweh! Kweeh…”

We uncover it together. A truculent amber-colored bottle, intact but packed to the neck with solidified mud. The label, remarkably, is still mostly legible: _Doctor Lyctor’s Magick Restorative & Elixir _ … _Cures Most Ills_ … _Restores Pep, Vim, Vigor_ … _Cleans the Liver_ …and perhaps the most “magick” words of all: _110 proof_.

Alpha gazes at me as I attempt to empty the bottle of its contents. Oh, not like _that_ …

I give its innards a final jolt before settling it in the sack with the rest of the day’s treasures. We’ve had a good haul so far, or at least enough to help me reinforce my standing as one of the world’s foremost geniuses of junk. It is all overwhelmingly Eorzean, which is to be expected. I suspect the turquoise colored pencil, plus one or two scraps of metal in there may be Othardian in origin, and there ought to be a jeweled charm of Thavnairian style towards the bottom of it, assuming it did not fall out of the bag along the way.

None of it is Garlean. I cannot tell if I am dismayed.

“Kwe-kweh?”

“Right, right, we’ll set down somewhere, soon as we find the right place for it. Do you hear those gulls, eh?”

Their cries pierce the fog. Like beacons, or some such. Aural buoys. My mind plays at imagining ships finding their ways to port by the shrieking of seabirds.

“Kweh!”

My mouth is playing at something else. Singing, sating an earworm trapped in my head since our visit to a rural seaside pub last night. I must candle it out verse by verse:

_Across the evening sky, all the birds are leaving_

_But how can they know it's time for them to go?_

_Before the winter fire, I will still be dreaming_

_I have no thought of time_

_For who knows where the time goes?_

_Who knows where the time goes?_

Such weather does strange things to the voice. My lachrymose-as-I-am-told tenor throbs and echoes near and far. I am doing it on the QT but I am sure they can probably hear it all the way to Aleport. Alpha coos along cheerfully. His accompaniment is appreciated though I question whether he could even fathom the concept of _loathing_ , by any stretch of the word.

We poke along the sullen seashore for about another half a malm before finally eddying to a rest around some mossy boulders. In the nick of time too; the weather is beginning to clear and we can see a little more of our surroundings. Spatterings of featureless trees and shrubs, and the darkening outline of a tower of some kind—not terribly tall but prominent enough to hold my attention, even as I fiddle with the bindle I strapped to Alpha’s back.

Nothing doing. We tuck in. Alpha is predictably eager to tear into his gysahl and tomato sandwich, while I begin with the fresh clementine I bought from a Qiqirn stand on the way here. Its skin is thin and tight against the fruit inside, indicating it was picked at the peak of ripeness. Possibly unbeknownst to the orchard owners, but I am certainly not going to snitch on dear Memeroon, who was kind enough to offer such a deep discount to an obvious outlander.

I am sure all of these pieces will connect eventually. Probably when I am back lying flat-out in bed in the Drowning Wench’s cheapest room, when it is too blissfully dark to notice the state of its decor.

Alpha and I carry on our usual variety of banter—featuring my rambling and his squeaking, which he makes either in response to what I am saying or simply because he enjoys the sound.

“Kweh kweh kwe-kweeh?” he asks, also having noticed the tower in the distance.

“Not sure,” I say. “Probably another lighthouse.”

“Kweeeeh?”

“Right. Like the one you met in Limsa Lominsa.”

“Kweh kweh! Kweh?”

“Well, here on Vylbrand, there are an awful lot of boats and an awful lot of nasty things for boats to get stuck on.” I peel a segment of clementine away from its juicy siblings and pop it into my mouth, which is important to note for precisely the same reason that I specified that Alpha was eating a gysahl and tomato sandwich; that is to say, it isn’t. “Cliffs and rocks and such. You see how rocky and muddy it is over here? And how the water just sort of loblollops around in these little inlets? Not like that big flat beach in Costa del Sol where the tide goes _whooooosh_ all day.”

Alpha appears thrilled at my highly technical descriptions of paradise. He flaps his little wings and wheezes as if to emulate my emulation of the pristine pink shorelines of the eastern half of this island. Where we decidedly aren’t.

We continue our conversation unabated until Alpha, pecking at the last bits of crust off a slice of Summerford Farms white, suddenly stiffens, alert in his silence. For a moment, I wonder if he is detecting another “funny turn” of mine, though I see none of the strange aura that precedes such events. Still, I make haste to finish off whatever I’ve got in my mouth. As I turn to dismount my rock, at last I notice what he is _actually_ noticing.

“Ahoy!” she cries, a large, blue-faced woman closing the muddy yalms between us at a meandering but steady clip. A Yellowjacket, Lominsan coast guard on patrol.

Alpha tweets and trills at her, apparently afraid she may crash into the boulders without the guidance of one of those lighthouses I have been advertising so ardently. Me, I only straighten my posture and wait, giving a perfunctory wave. Her pace suggests that whatever the matter is, it is about as significant as my specifying the variety of our sandwiches.

A matter, nevertheless.

“Hullo sir,” the woman says when she is within speaking distance. I can tell by the markings on her face that she is a Sea Wolf Roegadyn, while her accent suggests a life spent entirely in Vylbrand. My nose detects a faint whiff of cigarettes, the violet variety favored by women, and in particular, one Livia sas Junius.

I try not to recoil at the memory. “Madame.”

Alpha is already sketching circles in the sand about her feet. He warks his interest, ardently.

“Ah. Please do excuse him, he’s my companion,” I add. “I tried to tell him about strangers, but he still seems to like them very much.”

The Yellowjacket laughs. “That’s alright. He’s a good…uh.” The _realization_ that we all realize when first meeting Alpha has frozen this poor maid’s brain right solid. She stares at him, searching, her mouth forming indecisive syllables.

“Uh… A chocobo! Madame. He’s a special variety, imported from a very long ways away.”

“Kweh!”

“Oh! He is a bit small though,” she says. “Well. That’s alright, I suppose. Are you two making a day of it, then?”

“Pardon?”

The Yellowjacket gestures to our tidy pile, my unequipped sack of treasures. “Mudlarking?”

“Yes. Do you need to inspect it?”

She shakes her head. “But I do have to tell you that you need a writ.”

“Pardon?” The breeze tends to stall around these inlets, and the flapping is louder than expected. All other sounds are dominated by that wind whipping ‘round the curves of my ears.

“A _writ_ , sir. A mudlarking writ from the Admiral.”

“Oh!”

“Kweh?”

Oh, what a pointless invention. A permit to _mudlark_ , to collect the garbage washed ashore. As if one requires permission. As if Admiral Bloefhiswyn would desire to make prior claim to any of this (though admittedly, the turquoise colored pencil is very nice). But of course, you know me to be the sort of chap who prepares for precisely this genre of trouble. Let us just say that before embarking to Vylbrand, I conducted some independent research, familiarized myself with the Thalassocracy that composes the laws of these lands, and then familiarized myself with those who know how to deal with Thalassocracies (or, at the very least, how to spell them).

I _prepared_ , dear reader. And it was not cheap.

“Oh! Of course!” I smiled, all sweetness, and rooted around my personal satchel, a small leather purse that never leaves my side. I feel the Yellowjacket’s attention, a gaze that could boil mud. When I reveal the little pinkish slip of pointless bureaucracy from the billfold, her eyebrows begin to knit.

“Mm hm.” She takes the writ for closer inspection. In a moment I am relieved that the writ is not too _hot off the press_ to touch.

“Kwe…?” Alpha says quietly, perhaps already pleading our case.

Me, I am still humming quietly as we wait. That blasted earworm. Its second verse dog-paddles around my half-opened lips.

_Sad, deserted shore, your fickle friends are leaving_

_Ah, but then you know it's time for them to go_

_But I will still be here, I have no thought of leaving_

_I do not count the time_

_For who knows where the time goes?_

_Who knows where the time goes?_

“Hm. Mm hm.”

“Mm hm? Is something wrong?”

“No. The writ checks out, Mr. Ballenger,” says the Yellowjacket, effecting surprise before she hands it back to me. Money well spent. “Though I am also obligated to remind you that any intact munitions or weaponry you find must be relinquished to the Maelstrom as, under current trafficking laws, it is the property of the Admiral.”

I shrug. _Ballenger? Remind me to take a closer look at that thing…_ “Of course! Of course, me and my friend here’ve found naught but bonny old pipes in pieces as it were.”

“Kweh kweh!” ( _And the pencil!_ , is what I think Alpha is trying to say.)

“I’ll be sure to let your Admiral know if we stumble upon a magitek cannon.”

The Yellowjacket returns a watery laugh. “Oh, you are a _very_ long way from your motherland, sir,” she says, perhaps finally having noticed my third eye, “if you believe that our seas wouldn’t be glad to swallow such things.”

“Of course! I, er, read the plaque at the airship landing.” The collar of my jumper is beginning to feel a bit clammy.

“Kweh-kweh! Kweeeeeh…” At least Alpha is relishing his farewell pet from a fellow yellow-clad. I suppose it really does pay to be cute.

“Well, take care,” says the Yellowjacket when she is finished. “Mind the riptides, lads.”

“Right. Thank you.”

Alpha and I keep still as she begins to depart. My eye is soon drawn away from her back to that shaded column still looming down the shoreline, still partially obfuscated by the midday fog.

A bracing breeze nudges me forward ever so. I say! How pert to assume I should require supernatural prompting!

“Madame!”

I would note that she turns back now and says “Yes?”, but there is really no need to prolong this scene with any superfluous verbal clutter caused by the documentation of every single action as it happens. Rather, it will suffice if you know that we are once more in conversation, with me pointing at the mysterious obelisk or what have you.

“What is that?” I ask, plainly. No clutter, as I said.

“That tower? That’s the old Magarrigle Beacon.”

“So it _is_ a lighthouse. Looks rather dark to me.”

“Kweeh…?”

“Yes. During the Calamity, this portion of the island in particular suffered significant damage to its natural terrain,” says the Yellowjacket. She has a certain electricity crackling about her now, like she wants nothing more from this world at the moment than to zap back to her guard hut so she may graze on a violet cigarette and contemplate idiot tourists. “Parts of the shoreline were so altered—can you see how far inland it appears?”

I adjust my gaze, unsure of what I am looking for, but I’ll pretend to see it anyway. “Ah. Yes!”

“The original route around this part of the island got too shallow for safe navigation, so that lighthouse fell into disuse,” she continues. “It’s abandoned now. There’s a different lighthouse further up the shore that we maintain, that’s still active.”

“Is that where you’re based?” An innocent guess.

“Yes, sir.”

“A veritable wasp’s nest, eh.”

She did not find my remark as amusing as I did. “Yes, sir. And you would do well not to disturb it.”

We exchange good-byes and kwe-kwehs once more, but such perfunctories are only upstaged by that _old Magarrigle Beacon_ , as she dubbed it most optimistically. Even from here I can tell that it is falling most effortlessly into a wonderful shamble, eroded by weather, rusting and peeling. _Abandoned_ , she says? My my, I think not. I cannot take my eyes off it. Granted, there is not much else to look at in these parts, which makes its existence all the more compelling. Abandoned? _Really?_ Such a grand and imposing specimen of Eorzean maritime architecture? Another castaway disowned by the Admiral like so much flotsam?

_She_ _has_ _disowned it, right...?_

“E-excuse me, madame!” I call for the Yellowjacket’s back once more.

Ah, to be denied her respite yet again. Well, hopefully this episode will serve as encouragement to think twice about nagging unassuming beachcombers over something as absurd as a Mudlarking Permit. She changes course, stem to stern, anticipating my words without any of her own.

“Kweh?” Alpha sinks into my left ankle. He has officially abandoned this conversation to peck restlessly at my sock.

“Madame, are there _laws_ here?”

“Laws?”

I begin again. “In my old country there are certain laws regarding the reacquisition of public property.”

“I don’t follow you, sir.”

“As to prevent the senseless waste of public funding, whenever a municipal or civil building—like, say, a lighthouse—is abandoned for a certain period of time, it is considered free real estate for any person, persons or incorporated group of persons who may take it upon themselves to occupy the building and restore it to full operational status.”

The Yellowjacket glances to the sea for legal guidance that is never going to come; after all, Llymlaen was a navigator, not an attorney. “Are you asking me if you can live in that lighthouse? Sir?”

“I wasn’t asking.” But I do smile. Quickly. “Anyway, as you said, I’m very far from _the motherland_ aren’t I…?”

And I _am_ , so why bother denying it? We both know that there is nothing more to say. It is time for the final exchange of commonplace goodbyes and a few more kwe-kwehs, so we may rustle up our respective burdens and commence our respective afternoons.

I have at last acknowledged that the tall, dark and handsome stranger is waiting for _me_ up that shadowy coast. And that it is time to learn the lesson he has prepared.

Of course. I knew from the moment we noticed him that our day would end like this: Two beachcombers vanishing into the big grey elsewhere under the guidance of a dead beacon, toting our treasure, our broken pipe stems and tortoiseshell buttons and fallen soldiers and a little turquoise colored pencil that might be from Othard. As we press onwards, the wind resumes boxing our ears while northwestern Vylbrand’s famously grotty air settles against our necks, the sort of perspiration you’d wipe off a coffee pot after a long day’s perk. Alpha appears fluffier than usual, his little goggles opaque with the weather. But he is tweeting most heartily and I cannot keep myself from singing along.

Loudly this time, as loud as I can, the tail end of my earworm, freed at last.

_And I am not alone while my love is near me_

_I know it will be so until it's time to go_

_So come the storms of winter and then the birds in spring again_

_I have no fear of time_

_For who knows how my love grows?_

_And who knows where the time goes?_


End file.
